Quotes About Writing

How first you knew me in a book I wrote, How first you loved me for a written line

When a man can observe himself suffering and is able, later, to describe what he's gone through, it means he was born for literature.

Een van de dingen die ik leerde tijdens het schrijven van de roman, en ik heb er veel geleerd, was hoe moeilijk het is om nie te hechten aan de valse schijn van waarheid die een geschreven pagina wekt.

Beware the writer who always encloses the word "reality" in quotation marks: He's trying to slip something over on you.

Ah yes, the head is full of books. The hard part is to force them down through the bloodstream and out through the fingers.

What is the essence of the art of writing? Part One: Have something to say. Part Two: Say it well.

A writer must be hard to live with: when not working he is miserable, and when he is working he is obsessed. Or so it is with me. Thus my writing life consists of spells of languor alternating with fits and spasms of mad typing. At all times, though, I keep a journal, a record book, and most everything begins in the form of notes scribbled down on the pages of that journal.

When I want to write something I just sit down (or stand up) and do it. Scribble, scribble, nothing could be easier. It helps, naturally, to have something to say.

But hell, I do like to write letters. Much easier than writing books.

I might also say, regarding reviews and reviewers, that I have yet to read a review of any of my own books which I could not have written much better myself.

How become a writer? Naturally.

So I write mainly for the fun of it, the hell of it, the duty of it. I enjoy writing and will probly be a scribbler on my dying day, sprawled on some stony trail halfway between two dry waterholes.

I always write with my .357 Magnum handy. Why? Well, you never know when God may try to interfere.

Beware the writer who always encloses the word "reality" in quotation marks: He's trying to slip something over on you.

People often ask me how long it takes me to write a play, and I tell them 'all of my life.' I know that's not the answer they're after -- what they really want is some sense of the time between the first glimmer of the play in my mind, and the writing down, and perhaps the duration of the writing down -- but "all my life" is the truest answer.

I have been both overpraised and underpraised. I assume by the time I finish writing -- and I plan to go on writing until I'm 90 or gaga -- it will all equal itself out.

When I'm writing a play I hear it like music. I use the same indications that a composer does for duration. There's a difference, I tell my students, between a semi-colon and a period. A difference in duration. And we have all these wonderful things, we use commas and underlining and all the wonderful punctuation things we can use in the same way a composer uses them in music. And we can indicate, as specifically as a composer, the way we want our piece to sound.

When you write a play, you make a set of assumptions -- that you have something to say, that you know how to say it, that its worth saying, and that maybe someone will come along for the ride.

I'm back in fashion again for a while now. But I imagine that three or four years from now I'll be out again. And in another fifteen years I'll be back. If you try to write to stay in fashion, if you try to write to be the critics' darling, you become an employee.

The pen is mightier than the sword! a

Reading taught me that prison had been the crucible that had formed several great writers. Cervantes wrote much of Don Quixote in a prison cell, and Dostoyevski was a mediocre writer until he was sentenced to death, commuted within a few hours of execution, and then sent to prison in Siberia.

Though man is the only beast that can write, he has small reason to be proud of it. When he utters something that is wise it is nothing that the river horse does not know, and most of his creations are the result of accident.

To write is a humiliation.

Bad grammar makes me [sic].